The online sales market and its underlying technologies are quickly maturing. With the rapid market maturation, what were once competitive advantages are becoming commonplace. For example, most online consumers now expect competitive pricing, shopping carts, advance search capabilities, online status checking, email notifications, and more. These trends set lofty goals for companies who must develop more compelling online experiences, determine more ways to drive sales, and enhance their competitive advantages. Whether the intent is to sell complex or custom products over the Internet, to conduct one-on-one marketing, to understand the behavior and patterns of customers, to manage the ever-changing web store contents, or to enhance the ease of shopping, online companies must implement advanced techniques if they are to effectively compete.
The ever increasing level of competition necessitates the infusion of best practices from sales and marketing with compelling product offerings. Product Managers must be able to maintain and build complex selling models without the traditional reliance on skilled programmers. Moreover, e-commerce applications need to be rapidly deployed and must be easily maintainable, even for complex and custom products.
In order to create distinct competitive advantages, companies must integrate sales and services. To improve customer attraction and retention, companies must develop and manage customer relationship via better sales and service integration and new technology. To insure that buyers to find what they need and place an order, the online selling process must provide timely and accurate enterprise data, be structured in a way that is easy to use for the buyer, allow the buyers to find what they need without undue effort and frustration, and suggest products and services that are in the best interests of the customer.